It's gone.

Late to the party, but I have pictures.

The Bucket is gone. I sold it to a scrapyard on February 18th. A funny story: the car didn't want to leave. The tow truck driver apparently hooked the winch to a rather rusty part of the frame, and it gave way as he was cranking the car up onto the rollback. It rolled down the ramp and barreled back down the driveway towards the garage where it spent so much time, like a puppy that runs to its dog house when animal control comes to take it away.

Separation anxiety in the extreme.

Anyway, here are the pictures. Farewell, my friend. I gained a career's worth of knowledge about EFI and GM engine systems with you. You'll be missed once I finish repressing the memories of all the times you left me stuck on the side of the road.

Engine's out!

I pulled the engine out of the 'ol Bucket today. Not a whole lot to tell. The catalytic converter was melted and plugged, which was bad. I was going to keep it, but I guess I'll see if a recycler will pay for it.

Only mishap was a set the engine down right on top of my garage light, crushing it. Ooops.

On to the pictures!

Here it is in the engine bay:

From 1985 Pontiac Grand Prix

Here's the radiator on the floor

From 1985 Pontiac Grand Prix

On the way out

From 1985 Pontiac Grand Prix

Up

From 1985 Pontiac Grand Prix

Out

From 1985 Pontiac Grand Prix

And on the floor!

From 1985 Pontiac Grand Prix

Though not pictured, I've already separated the transmission and gotten the engine up on a stand.

I've already called the junkyard. They'll be coming to get it on Monday or Tuesday, then the Datsun can go back in the garage.

Plumbing...

No updates on the car, because I've been working on the house.

From that work, I've learned a few things about plumbing:

1) Don't try to fix a problem if you can bypass it. Ripping out walls is a pain
2) You only get one shot with PVC. Measure three times.
3) Gaskets are single use, and most "kits" for items like toilets will be missing parts from the store.

Cars are easier. I suspect it's because cars are designed with some expectation of maintenance. Homes are not.

Disassembly has begun...

I've started pulling the low-hanging fruit, so to speak, out of The Bucket. Today I managed to yank the rear shocks, the radio, the rear deck speakers, the wideband O2 sensor, and drain the radiator. I already have a buyer for the shocks, so I'll be pulling the fronts tomorrow and hopefully shipping them out later this week.

With the radiator drained, I can pull it. I think I'll be able to use the big electric fan on the Datsun. The radiator itself will go up in the attic as a spare for the Grand National, and I dunno what I can use the second fan for. Maybe it can blow on an aux oil cooler in the Z if I ever get one.

With the radiator out, I should be able to get the engine out in short order. We shall see.

The pain became too great...

Well, it's over. After dying twice in the line to drop my son off at school, requiring me to push it out of the way and wait for it to cool off and/or whatever what was wrong with it, I've given up on the '85GP.

After much research and a little negotiation, I shelled out $9700 for this Panzerwagon:



It's a 1999 BMW 540i with a six speed manual. It had been on a local car lot for the better part of a year with a malfunctioning alarm, non-working CD changer, a toasted clutch, and a couple handfuls of other broken bits. During that year, the dealer had put on a new alternator, radiator, and replaced a broken right rear window regulator (and fucked the door panel to hell in the process). They had it advertised for $11,995. I walked out with it for $9700. Spent another $1400 on a clutch and a new set of tires, and off I went.

Since the purchase, I've put almost 2000 miles on it. It's been to Cincinatti and back, and Madison Indiana with nary a hiccup. I've also blasted through a list of minor broken things:

• Replaced broken rear cupholders with a nice little storage cubby
• Fixed the right rear door (outer handle didn't work)
• Replaced the front speakers in the stereo
• Replaced a fuse on the CD changer and got it working again
• Replaced the main battery, which had the side effect of fixing the goofy alarm. The dealer had installed a nice, brand new Interstate, but the one they installed was 200 amps too small and they promptly allowed it to go flat and stay there, ruining it.
• Replaced the leaking valve cover gaskets and changed the oil

That's pretty much everything that was broken on the car. It's nearly good as new.

I'm getting - no joke - 21mpg around town, and we saw 26mpg on our trip to Cincinnati. All the widgets work inside the car. The display under the speedo is missing some pixels, but that seems to be normal for German cars of this vintage. Best of all, it starts every time and doesn't overheat and die in line to drop my kid off at school. It's also the nicest car I've ever driven. Quiet, smooth, handles well, lots of power... it's everything I wanted The Bucket to be, plus it doesn't have any rust. Coil-on-plug also means I no longer have to deal with burned up ignition wires.

And The Bucket? I've already sold the Megasquirt. I'll soon be pulling the drivetrain and electronics (stereo and speakers), pulling the hi-po shocks off and putting the Gabriels back on, and then dragging the car to Pull-A-Part where it will be sold for scrap. The tires are going to my Dad for his in-progress '66 Mustang restoration.

All this means that the original purpose of this blog, to document the work on The Bucket, is gone. I may update this with the deconstruction, and hopefully a memorial to the car when I finally drag it to the scrapyard.

So, I'm actually doing pretty good with this thing...

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/FEG/noframes/519.shtml

Yup, original fuel economy information for the 1985 Grand Prix with the 5.0L V8 and a 3 speed.

15/20. I'm getting that when I don't have roasted plug wires. Hoo-ray for matching the factory with a bigger engine, bigger camshaft, and 3.73 gears out back. Go me.

#$@#% ignition!

So, last tank was a paltry 13.4mpg and it feels like the miss is back.

I go and inspect the plug wires. Two are burned up. TWO. These are supposed to be super-duper high-temp wires. Burned wires on on the passenger bank, so the O2 sensor didn't pick up on it.

Oh, and Edelbrock, your T.E.S. headers for G-bodies are SHIT. I'm sorry, but the passenger side header provides no way to get the damn plug wires to the distributor without running them dangerously close to the primaries. Technically, you owe me three sets of Accel Spiral-Core plug wires.

I've wrapped the burned up wires in electrical tape and tied them up against the valve cover. Hopefully they'll last until I can get some different headers. Wife's going to love this...

Andrew as a gerbil...

Save the Richard Gere jokes.  This was over at Icanhazcheeseburger.com.  Topical, I thought.

15.2 mpg!

Okay, so I got the timing control in the distributor. Prior to that, I had richened up the fuel map to get the car to run smoother, dropping my gas mileage into the low 14s and high 13s. After the first tankful using the computer-controlled timing, a tankful that included a lot of city driving, and lots of putting my lead foot into it trying to tune the upper parts of the fuel map, I'm back in the 15s.

I'm going to drive like a grandmother this tank and see if I can stretch it into the 16s. I've also reduced the authority on the closed-loop algorithm. While I was tuning the maps, I gave it 10% leeway in either direction, I've necked that down to just 5%. The swings are much reduced as seen on the wideband and in the datalogs, so hopefully that'll cut my fuel usage more.

Computer controlled timing!

Finally, I've done it. During that horrible UK/UL football game Sunday, I did the board modifications to allow me to run a computer-controlled distributor.

I then spent three nights, probably 9 hours total, fighting with what I thought were bad HEI modules and coils. Turns out the instructions for modding the megasquirt had me use a resister on the tach circuit that was way too high impedance. I replaced the resister and it started right up.

I ran it around the block yesterday afternoon, and it ran great. Idles better, miss at cruise is gone, and the car can pull all the way to 5000 rpm with no spark scatter. Then it died. After sitting on the side of the road for a few minutes, It started again. I'm guessing an overheated coil. I changed the poop coil I had been using during the troubleshooting out for my good coil and made the drive in to work this morning with nary a hiccup.

Now to find some time to get over to Autolab and use their dyno.

15.4mpg

Some more tweaking on the map netted me another 0.5mpg. That's an additional 3%. I may be able to gain a bit more by tweaking the cold start stuff, I think I'm richer than I need to be under warmup. The priming pulse is also too long and is flooding the engine, so that's wasted gas as well.

In August the Street Rods are coming to town. Hopefully I can score a 3.42 or 3.08 ring and pinion for my rear end. That'll drop my cruising revs a bit and fix the speedometer.

I also need bigger fans. I've seen the coolant temp as high at 230 degrees on a 92 degree day sitting still in traffic.

14.9mpg!

Yes, lower than the 15mpg I posted earlier, but there's a caveat:

That 15mpg was 60 miles of highway driving. This 14.9 is 191 miles of mixed city driving.

Also, updates to this blog will probably slow down again. At 6:45 am on June 17, my daughter, Wednesday Judith Huffman Scott, was born. She was 8 pounds, 6 ounces, and 19.5 inches long. A week later sees her back up to her birth weight and the whole family is doing quite well. She is sleeping well, eating well, and has proven to be a poop machine.

Refinement

Not being one to leave well enough alone, I set about trying to improve my erratic RPM signal. As you can see in this picture, the RPM (yellow plot, top graph) the Megasquirt has been reading has been really choppy. This can be due to lots of reasons, but the biggest is noise getting into the signal line.


After about 30 minutes of fiddling, a 10K ohm resister turned out to be the best at filtering out the noise without cutting off the signal entirely. You can see a huge difference in the graph below (again, yellow plot).

Fixed!

Finally, after nearly two years, the car runs properly!

In addition to the plugwire I saw shorting the other night, one plug wire was disconnected. The car has been running on six cylinders for a long time. The plug was fouled something terrible.

I got the new shorty plugs installed last night, got the new wires and looms installed, and drove the car to soccer with my stepson. It has power now, like it should. It runs smoothly, like it should. I was seeing some pretty high temperatures last night (205 degrees coolant and 165 degrees intake air). I hooked the vacuum advance back up this morning, and that solved that problem. Not enough timing at cruise generates a lot of heat.

Oh, I also fixed the sticking rear brake. I took the drum off and sanded the shoes and the inside of the drum, then doused it all in brake cleaner, and cleaned the drum with carb cleaner. It still smelled like gear oil, I guess the stuff managed to embed itself in the pores of the metal. If the squeal and sticking comes back, I'll have to get that drum turned down a couple thousandths.

I'm pretty happy right now.

Parts parts parts

Well, O'Reilly had everything. I got new plug wires, shorty header plugs, and a wire loom kit. $100, but it should hopefully end these recurring ignition problems, and hopefully bump the gas mileage a bit more. If it can get to 20mpg, these parts will pay for themselves quite rapidly.

Damnit!

Way back on March 15, 2007, I detailed a burned up spark plug end that was causing a miss.

Well, it's happened again. I bought schmancy new high-temp 8mm Accel wires, and have them in the little fiberglass socks, and I still managed to burn one up. Found it again tonight with the idling-car-in-the-dark trick.

So, tomorrow, I'm off to O'Reilly to pick up another set of plug wires and hopefully they can order me some shorty spark plugs to give me more header clearance. Their web site says they have them but they have to be ordered. I may call Street 'n Strip and see if they have them in stock or not. Hopefully they do.

I disconnected the vacuum advance, too. Feels a little better until it gets hot and that plug starts shorting.

It's a miracle the catalytic convertor hasn't taken a dump yet. I'm going to have to check the oil, too. Stupid car.

15mpg!!!

Woo-hoo! Drove sixy miles last night on four gallons of fuel. Yee-haw.

Finally, improvement.

13.2mpg

GODDAMNIT!

Runs much smoother with the timing fix. I'll check back in after I go through another tank.

Timing is everything

So, I'm almost through the first tank of gas since fixing all the fuel issues. I don't know the mileage yet as I haven't filled up, but it looks to be a bit higher than it was. I'm at 210 miles on the odometer with about a quarter tank left. After adjusting for the incorrect speedometer gear, that means ~175 miles on ~12 gallons, or 14.5 mpg. That's a vast improvement, nearly 50% over pre-fuel fix (10mpg).

Moving the bottleneck down to the next step in the ladder, I went outside today with my fancy timing light to check the timing. With the vacuum line off at idle, in gear, 12 degrees. Perfect. With the vacuum hooked up? 35. Oh snaps. Too high.

Rev the engine to around 2000rpm in neutral? FIFTY DEGREES of advance. That's way too much. I backed the vacuum advance off until it was 40 degrees at 2000rpm. That put it ~23 degrees at idle, and really smoothed things out a lot. We'll see how it drives on the way to work tomorrow.

Progress? I think yes...

Verdicts after driving to work this morning:

1. No exhaust leaks when I started it, and it was colder this morning.
2. Thanks to the fixed exhaust leaks, the wideband was showing sane numbers
3. Valve tick is gone
4. I was crossing an AFR border on my target table on the way in to work today. I've raised my 16.0:1 AFR cruise block by one row to try and get a leaner cruise at highway speeds. The difference appears to be large. Using the calculated instang MPH in the log viewer, at 65mph, an AFR of 16.0:1 = ~24mpg. 15:1 = 17mpg. Its huge. Just hope running it at 16:1 doesn't melt anything.

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